Category Archives: Islamic Law

Perhaps you’ve had this experience: You’re discussing historical events or the issues of the day with a liberal or left friend, and suddenly he seizes up. His eyes glaze over, lids droop, and out comes something like,

“Republicans are racists!”

“The science is settled!”

And the show stoppers:

“Sarah Palin!” “Bush!”

They seem to derive the same comfort from this as might a Buddhist chanting the Lotus Sutra. And while you may observe this in a wide range of settings, with men and women of different ages and skin tones, there is a remarkable consistency, down to vocabulary and syntax, in these ejaculations.

This is the voice of the left-progressive- liberal Borg.

On no other issue is the assimilation of these once (perhaps) individual minds into a collective voice more complete than it is in matters pertaining to Islam. More than once I’ve startled friends and acquaintances by pre-echoing what I knew was about to come out of their mouths.

What with beheadings and jihad in the news, I thought I’d provide a public service for those of you who may not have been as aware of the, ahem, problematic nature of Islam, as I have for so long, but are savvy enough to know that whatever liberals in government, academia and the media say about Islam, it has to be a crock.

Islamophobia!

This one is really worthy of no more than an eye roll and gag mime. A phobia is an irrational fear. Any thinking person will know that there are, at the very least, currenst within the Islamic world that are cause for concern.

The term itself was invented by operatives of the Islamic Circle of North America, a Muslim Brotherhood front group, in a quite clever piggyback on the success of “homophobia,” which –given Islam’s attitude towards homosexuality – is worth an ironic giggle.

Racism!

This is the standard condemnation– and, in Europe legally sanctioned to the point of trial, fines and incarceration – of criticism of Islam. It hasn’t gone that far in the U.S. yet, but racists are bad people who leave comments on Stormfront. You wouldn’t want to be one of them, would you?

But, you might ask, Islam is a religion, so what has it got to do with it?. This is another example of leftist induction based on an irrelevant truth. While there are many Muslims, particularly in the Caucasus and former Ottoman territories who would not look any different from the average white Mid-westerners, the majority of them are of non-European stock.

But, so what? Ronald Reagan might have been accused of being a war monger, and mindless anti-communist, a Soviet Union hater, but he wasn’t called anti Russian.

And, secondarily, in the leftist mind, people who don’t like Islam tend to be Republicans, fundamentalist Christians, Reich Wingers, and other undesirables who especially dislike President Obama, and are, therefore, racist.

The Inquisition!

The burning of heretics at the stake is not a Catholic monopoly

The burning of heretics seems to have become standard around the8th Century in Eastern and Western Christianity, as well as Islam, but the Inquisition reached its apogee in the High Middle Ages. Here,Knights Templar burned in 1314.

In the earliest days of Islam, during the 7th Century Ridda Wars in Arabia following Mohammed’s death the Caliph Abu Bakar burned many apostates. Death by fire for apostates and heretics were reported among the Ottomans and in the Barbary States well into the 18th Century

The 9th Century Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mun instituted an inquisition to punish and at times execute those who contested the eternal and uncreated nature of the Koran. The most prominent victim was Mansur al-Hallaj, Persian born Sufi mystic, who was slowly chopped to bits, and his remains then burned in Baghdad in 922.

The execution of al-Hallaj

One can get into a numbers game, but this is fruitless and irrelevant as it is striking that death for apostasy remains uncontested in Islamic jurisprudence, and is applied under the legal codes of a number of Muslim countries today – most prominently, Saudi Arabia.

“What about the Crusades?”

Yeah, what about them?

The proximate cause, was, as any Catholic school child, at least, learned in the 50s, was the Seljuk Turks cutting off pilgrimage routes to the Holy land, as well as robbing and murdering pilgrims and local Christians.

The greater cause was Islamic imperialism. One again, going back to my 50s classroom, I remember the history book, the arrows advancing from Arabia across the Middle East and North Africa and into Spain and beyond.

Tours, Charles Martel. Roland at Roncesvalles. Ok, Roland was actually fighting Basques, not Muslims, as the legend has it, and Tours was not a decisive as I was taught, but Islamic forces did reach Central France in the 8th Century and were in the end turned back.

The Near East and North Africa once were Christian, and Greek, Latin and Syriac speaking. Now that vast area is primarily Muslim and Arabic speaking. The Crusaders may then be seen as a belated response to Muslim aggression against the disordered post-Roman West.

Religious inspired terrorism isn’t just a Muslim thing. What about Timothy McVeigh, The IRA and abortion clinic bombings?

While you might not get all these in one sentence, you probably will in a single session as you bat them down one by one. There is more than one thing going on here.

First, is the old moral equivalence game. We saw this back in the Cold War. Segregation and lynching in the American South, for example, while perhaps not equivalent to the Gulag, showed that at heart we were no better.

This is a rhetorical trick which leftists think is pretty slick, but which merely exposes the poverty of their reasoning. State a truth so general as to be useless as a reference point, but which, in the leftist mind, is all encompassing and subsumes your argument to theirs.

If a guy smacks his wife and lays her flat, do we respond by saying, ”Everybody gets angry?”

Next there is the leftist’s habit in argumentation of spitting out isolated snippets of fact, which in his mind, are signifiers of entire narratives that are, in his world, given, and need not, indeed should not be questioned. These isolated facts are almost always irrelevant or outdated.

The last abortion clinic bombing in the United States was in 1998.

More than ten years later, the last fatality I could find was the murder of Dr. George Tiller in 2009. His killer is serving life with no parole for at least 50 years. Worldwide, total fatalities in anti-abortion violence, to date fall far short of the average market bombing in Baghdad.

Anti abortion violence is also an example of the Left’s love of weak, or more often, entirely faulty syllogism. These embedded causal chains are the mortar that holds the Left world view together.

This one is about as strong as it gets, which is not much.

There is no doubt that anti-abortion violence has a religious dimension. While there are secularists and even atheists uneasy with abortion (I recommend reading Christopher Hitchens on this), opposition comes largely from believers, with the Catholic Church in the van.

The religious horror at abortion comes from scriptural injunction against the taking of life. This also precludes the killing of an abortionist. Thus, we have a religiously inspired motivation for this violence, without any basis in religion.

Islam, starting with its (in)famous Verse of the Sword, has no such scruples in employing homicide in its advancement.

Unless you’ve been in such talks, a Lefty shouting “Timothy McVeigh!” in defense of Islam, might seem like a bit of Tourette’s, but is in fact an example of deductive absurdity that underlies much of their thinking.

Murderer Timothy McVeigh: Bright, misguided, and a decent prose stylist, but not at all concerned with religion.

Here’s how it works: McVeigh blew up that federal building, because he didn’t like big government. People who don’t like big government, such as the Tea Party, believe in God. So, Timothy McVeigh bombed for God, just as Muslims do for Allah, when they are not bombing because of poverty or imperialism, that is.

That baptized, but non practicing as an adult, Roman Catholic McVeigh was a self professed agnostic to the day before his death, who only a few hours before the needle, decided to make Pascal’s wager and took the last rites, is something that evades the Left.

Then there is the IRA. It works the same way here. The IRA bombed and killed on behalf of Northern Ireland’s Catholic majority, so clearly they must have been motivated by religion. The Provos, the most extreme of the bunch, were basically Trotskyites with brogues, but somehow that doesn’t signify. Much as in the conflict between Serbs and Croats, religion in Northern Ireland defines ethnicity between groups who are otherwise identical in appearance and language, and the IRA had no interest in imposing Catholicism on anyone, least of all themselves, as they would have to rise early on Sundays after a night at the pub.

There’s a lot of bad stuff in the bible, too.

This comes up when you quote the Koran and relate it present day Islamic violence.

Indeed, Ecclesiastes is a byword for cruel punishment, particularly for moral transgressions. However, you won’t find its strictures in the civil code of Israel.

The genocides conducted by the Hebrews as they occupied Canaan are a favorite of the moral equivalence crowd. These slaughters are pretty gruesome, and too numerous to go into here. However, one reading other chronicles of Middle East peoples such the Hittites and Assyrians will be struck by the similarities. Islam has been largely consistent in offering the option of conversion over death, whereas the Israelites seemed to have had little interest in increasing the number of Jews. Ancient Israel had an expansionist phase, but located between other massive powers as it was, never got very far. Nor is there a consistent imperative to spread Yahweh’s religion to the ends of the earth.

As to the leading characters of the Old Testament, even the best are flawed. We are told to admire David’s bravery and love of the Lord, but not encouraged to steal other men’s wives as he did Bathsheba.

In Islam, though, Mohammed, “al-Ihsan(the Perfect One) is held up as a model for all Muslims in every aspect of his character and deeds. Conquests, enslavement of non Muslims, and their killing, rape and plunder, may thus still be admirable ends to Muslims, as they were for Islam’s founder.

Those looking for equivalence in the Bible to Islam, focus on the Old Testament, the Hebrew Torah, because the new Christian dispensation is of no use to them at all. Jesus had some hard words for sinners, but killed none, nor asked that others do so.

Israel is the problem.

This one introduces positions that range from the end of Israel to a “fair” deal for the Palestinians. Again, refer to the history of jihad. And not to go all wonky, but Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the font of the modern Jihad, acted in response to the Kemalist abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, when the ink on the Balfour Declaration was barely dry.

If we didn’t bomb and invade Muslim countries they wouldn’t dislike us so much.

Black Hawk Down, Mogadishu, Somalia, 1993.

I certainly agree that this is waste of lives and money, but it is curious to note that, since the Viet Nam War, aside from Grenada and Panama, every American military intervention abroad has involved Muslims, and aside from the Balkans, where Orthodox Serbia was the enemy, the U.S. has been defending one bunch of Muslims from another.

Radical Muslims are a tiny minority

Here we are getting into area where the Borg speaker rather than deflecting from Islam, purports to know something about it. As usual, his facts are irrelevant or distorted.

So, how tiny is tiny? Surveys of opinion, in both of Muslim countries and in Muslim populations in the West, consistently show very large numbers supporting sharia law, jihad, suicide bombers, Hamas and Hezbollah, and the destruction of Israel. These figures rise and fall and vary from place to place, but in the aggregate amount to hundreds of millions of Muslims. Pew Research reports regularly on these issues.

There is also, again, the matter of thirteen centuries of jihad in Europe, Africa and Asia.

Islam is a religion of Peace. “Islam” itself means peace.

While the word is derived in Arabic from the same root of that for the word for peace, Islam means submission. In the Islamic view a peaceful world will arise when the entire globe submits to Islam. Islamic geopolitics sees the world divided in twain: Dar ul Islam, the house of Peace, has already submitted. Dar ul Harb, the house of War –that’s us – has not.

It is also important to note that while Islam is seen as, and sees itself as a universal religion, the Koran says that it was revealed in Arabic, to the Arabs as they ”… are the best of peoples, evolved for mankind, enjoining what is right, forbidding what is wrong, and believing in Allah.”

Radical Muslims misunderstand their religion.

This is something the Borg talker will repeat when they hear explanations of Islamic violence from Muslims. So what is it exactly that they misunderstand? Ask for citations from Islamic scripture, and classical Muslim commentators.

Note also that there are many Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists who engage in worship, but are weak in, or even largely ignorant of their respective theologies, but there doesn’t seem to be a problem with them and religiously inspired violence.

Conclusion

There is probably more, but I’ll stop here. Writing this has been almost as wearying as arguing with leftists. I don’t at all care for Islam, but there is an injunction against “arguing with fools” in Islamic law. I kind of get that, but persist.

Looking back at these pages, I see that a few leftie discourse markers have inspired me to write more than a couple of thousand words in rebuttal. Behind these words are entire libraries and disciplines, which I have barely plumbed.

I persist because I’m interested. Practically speaking, these points likely won’t change any Leftists’ minds, but they might just shut them up. That’s why I haven’t included much in the way of links. I’ve done my research. Let the lefties support their own assertions, with their own research.

They won’t, of course. But, hey, whatever.

Then, if your friends are like mine, you can put it aside, have a few drinks, and enjoy the fruits of the civilization bequeathed to us by fighters such as Charles Martel, one in which I and my friends can hoist a craft beer, and agree to disagree.

Does anyone remember Ahmad Kashgari, the young Saudi journalist and blogger, returned by Malaysia to Saudi Arabia, after a red notice issued by Interpol at the Kingdom’s request? Mr. Kashgari had expressed some mild doubts, and not disbelief in, as to the character of Islam’s prophet, Mohammed. Thousands called for his death. He has recanted, but is still imprisoned. Even if released, it is unlikely that he will ever know freedom, and will live out his life in that desert prison nation.

The greater scandal was that Interpol, headed by an American, headquartered in Lyon, France,cooperated in a depriving a man of his freedom for violation of ancient religious law. Now it appears that Interpol may be at it again, this time with the cooperation of Sweden, a country that touts itself as a bastion of tolerance and liberal values, but which has abased itself to multiculturalism, opened its borders, and subjected its people to assaults on their persons, as well as their ancient values and freedoms.

As reported 2 September 2012, in the English language Saudi Gazette:

Efforts on to bring back ‘Al-Khobar girl’ from Sweden

AL-KHOBAR — The Al-Khobar girl who fled the Kingdom after allegedly converting to Christianity will be brought home from Sweden in a matter of few days, Al-Yaum newspaper reported Saturday quoting informed sources.

The(sic) Interpol is coordinating with the Saudi Embassy in Stockholm and Swedish authorities to return the girl to her homeland before her “kidnappers” move her to another country, the sources said.

This story started showing up a few days ago on conservative, Christian, and anti-jihad sites. “Al Khobar girl” is a telling trm, aimed at leading readers to think we are dealing with a minor whose parents have her best interests at heart. No age is given, and this is significant: in Islam, women are not considered autonomous indivuals, and never achieve majority, remaining children, and chattels, throughout their lives.

It is intereting that the Gazette gave both “Al Khobar Girl, in the headline, and “kidnappers” in the body, quotation marks, which, given the climate in the Kingdom, is a subtle but still gutsy note of skepticism.

That skepticism is warranted is demonstrated by this statement:

Sources said it is highly likely that a global human trafficking network was involved in the kidnapping of the girl, who was persuaded by her Lebanese manager to embrace Christianity and leave the country without the knowledge of her family.

Human Trafficking? Really? Have the pervs become so jaded that they are no longer satisfied with Russians, Romanian, Kazakh, Moldavan, and Mainland Cinese women – all of which operate here in Indonesia, where I live, especially in Jakarta’s Chinatown, where these working girls pull down a grand a night or more – that traffickers are looking for novelty in Saudi Arabian hookers?

I doubt it.

That the young woman embraced Christianity, fled and is now being sought by the Saudi and Swedish authorities, facilitated by Interpol, I’ll take as true, until any of these deny it. Whether Western media decide to pursue this story remains to be seen, but I’m certainly not expecting women’s rights organization to take up the Saudi “girl’s” defense.

In the United states, those who warn about the influenced of Sharia law are routinely derided as bigots and nuts. Lost in the politically correct white noise is that the anti- shariah movement does not posit that the the Supreme court will one day be staffed with bearded, turbaned kadis, but that U.S. case law might be decided with reference to the shariah, and without regard to basic constitutional principles. In fact, this has already happened. The anti Islamic law movement has morphed into a ant iforeign law movement, which is gaining momentum despite denigration by media and government voices.

Those, generally on the left, who deride these efforts as at worse “islamophobic bigotry,” and at best frivolous, should reflect on Mr. Kashgari, who was returned from Malaysia en route to New Zealand, in response to Interpol’s red notice, to Saudi Arabia, were the penalty for his offece is ofcially, death, as it is for that of the “al-Khobar girl.”

Malaysia is an Islamic country but now we may have Western authorities colluding to return a Muslim to face punishment for something that is not an offense in any Western legal tradition.

How long before a Westerner suffers rendition for an offense to Islam?

A couple of weeks ago, a video appeared on the internet. Another beheading, but what made it unusual was that it was shown on Egyptian TV by talk show host Tawfiq Okasha, described in various postings as a liberal, on his show “Egypt Today.” Mr Okash said the crime took place in Tunisia and that the film showed men beheading a Christian for the crime of having converted from Islam.

Some days later other posts and comments appeared on line saying that the video was first posted by the Free Syrian Army, and that the victim was an a Alawite, the Shia offshoot to which Assad belongs.

The internet is replete with this sort of thing, the decapitation of Daniel Berg in Iraq being the most widespread. Some years ago, I watched the film of Mr. Berg’s last minutes, and had not returned for more.

This time, I felt that if Mr Okash was brave enough to show this on Egyptian T.V., and ask the anguished question, “Is this Islam,” I would do him the courtesy of watching.

I don’t speak Arabic but have enough words to pick up a little of the gist. The words “murtad,” apostate, and “mushrik,” polytheist – which Muslims consider Christians, with their concept of the Trinity to be – recur over and over again.

What did I see? I saw a man have his head slowly severed from his body, as I had seen before, the initial cut severing the carotid much the same as the that of the halal slaughter method, so one hears a gurgling as the victim continues to breathe though the blood.

The young man first lies calmly with the knife at his throat, calm, his eyes doe like, with either the peace of resignation, hope for the life hereafter, or perhaps drugged, although I very much doubt this kind of mercy was shown.

The first slice is shallow, and the blood starts. Then the sawing begins, and it goes on for a very long time, as the killer slices and also bends the head away from the growing neck cut so that one is presented a grisly anatomy lesson. Within this time the life drains from the eyes and death triumphs.

When the head comes free it is lifted in triumph to cries of Allahu Akbar ( Allah is greater). Then as I had seen before, the head is set upon the trunk, much as one might display a hunting trophy,

Some days after the video appeared, posts appeared on line showing the video in earlier posts, and stating that it was not in Tunisia, but Syria, citing the use of the epithet “rafidi”( deserter), which they say is used for Shia, but certainly could describe anyone who left Islam. Not knowing the word then, I didn’t hear it, and have no desire to watch again so as to confirm this. Most said it was the Free Syrian Army, who are Sunni, killing an Alawite . A few said the victim was Shabiha, as the informal militias of street thugs, and undercover secret police Assad employs are known. These commenters thought the man got what he deserved, and looked forward to more of the same.

Some thought the audio might have been dubbed, although I haven’t found that anyone has yet done any forensics to prove or disprove this.

In the end, It really doesn’t matter. What does, is the answer to Mr. Okasha’s question, “Is this Islam?”

And the answer is yes, it is , and has always been thus.

The Islamic tradition of the end of the Jewish Banu Quraiza tribe after their defeat in Medina at the Battle of the Trench is iconic.

“The Jews were made to come down, and Allah’s Messenger imprisoned them. Then the Prophet went out into the marketplace of Medina , and he had trenches dug in it. He sent for the Jewish men and had them beheaded in those trenches. They were brought out to him in batches. They numbered 800 to 900 boys and men. As they were being taken in small groups to the Prophet, they said to one another, ‘What do you think will be done to us?’ Someone said, ‘Do you not understand. On each occasion do you not see that the summoner never stops? He does not discharge anyone. And that those who are taken away do not come back. By God, it is death!’ The affair continued until the Messenger of Allah had finished with them all.”

Narrated Atiyyah al-Qurazi: I was among the captives of Banu Qurayza. They (the Companions) examined us, and those who had begun to grow hair (pubes) were killed, and those who had not were not killed. I was among those who had not grown hair.

Narrated Aisha: No woman of Banu Qurayza was killed except one. She was with me, talking and laughing on her back and belly (extremely), while the Apostle of Allah (peace be upon him) was killing her people with the swords. Suddenly a man called her name: Where is so-and-so? She said: I asked: What is the matter with you? She said: I did a new act. She said: The man took her and beheaded her. She said: I will not forget that she was laughing extremely although she knew that she would be killed.

As for apostasy, the penalty is death, although beheading may not be the sole means of execution.

From “Reliance of the Traveler,” A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred law( ISBN 0-9159-5772-8), which represents the Hanafi school of jurisprudence which dominates in Sunni Islam. The translation is endorsed by Al Azhar Univeristy Cairo, among other authorities.

Section o8.1 “When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostasizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed.”

And, lest one think that the word “deserves’ indicates opinion only, 08.2 goes on to say, “In such a case it is obligarory for the Caliph( or his representative) to ask him to repend and return to Islam. If he does, it is accepted from him, but if he refuses, he is immediately killed.”

Given the example of Islam’s founder, beheading is understandably the method of choice, as in Saudi Arabia, although Iran has progressed to the Seventeenth Century or so, with hanging.

So, Mr. Okahsa, this is Islam. Clearly you were appalled, but if your horror is to have any meaning, you must look squarely at your religious tradition and admit what it is now, if you are to have any hope of changing it to something on which you could look on without being sickened

An Indonesian "punker" rallies in support of his Aceh brothers and sisters.

Euro punks ca 80s

Not lost amid the events roiling the world – the threatened euro meltdown, riots and repression in Egypt, killings of protestors in Syria, the death of North Korea’s dear leader, is the story of a bunch of kids snatched up by police at a Punk rock concert in Aceh, Indonesia.

Punk has been around a long time. Sid vicious and Johnny rRotten raged in the 70s, but to a lot of kids around the world, adapting what they see as a punk lifestyle,centered on music, tattoos, piercings and just generally, looking and acting weird, and not fitting in, is the way to find identity in repressive societies.

Aceh, the northern most part of Sumatra in the West of Indonesia, is a beautiful land of forested mountains, rushing rivers, long white beaches and reefs teeming with life. A trading entrepot for many centuries, its culture is a an eclectic mix of local, India, Arab and Chinese influences.

Caning in Banda Aceh. Despite generally very nice people, great food, and stunning scenery, Aceh's tourist potential is unlikely to be developed soon.

It is also the place where Islam entered Indonesia, and has been under Shariah law under the terms of the autonomy agreement signed in Helsinki,in 2005, between the Indonesian government and rebels who had fought a three decades long independence war. Aceh has long been a place ruled by traditional Islamic mores, and while the shariah regime is yet lighter than in Saudi Arabia, it is tightening its grip.

Aceh first came to the notice of the entire world for its enormous suffering from the 2004 Tsunami, but lately its press has been rather poor. The punk round up is the latest in a series of stories that have shown the brutal, and frequently illogical, face of shariah to the world.

Ritual Purification? Punks are unclean!

“There will be a traditional ceremony. First their hair will be cut. Then they will be tossed into a pool. The women’s hair we’ll cut in the fashion of a female police officer,” Iskander said on Tuesday. “Then we’ll teach them a lesson.” said Aceh police chief Ins. Gen. Iskandar Hasan, as reported by the Jakarta Globe. “I’ll remind [police] not to breach human rights,” He concluded.(13 December)

Human rights in Islam are analogous to animal rights in an abattoir: they may be acknowledged, but the outcome in both cases is equally grim.

Chief Hasan may sound hypocritical and illogical, but within the closed system that is Islam, he makes perfect sense: helping Muslims adhere to Islamic rules upholds their right to be perfect Muslims, and more importantly, the right of the Ummah ( Islamic community) to have no imperfect Muslims among its members.

The Globe headline speaks of “reeducation,” but what the police chief proposed, and subsequently carried out, has much in common with Isamic religious practice and jurisprudence.

.And clearly these Muslims do not consider being a punk good. The “pool of water ” is reminscent of the ghusl, a purificatory bath to remove janaba, ritual defilement. The haircuts too, have some support:

It is offensive to shave part of the head and leave part unshaven.

So mohawks are out.

Mohawks are prohibited, but a clean shave is OK,

However,

There is no harm in shaving it all off

On the other hand,The girls who had their long hair shorn may have a beef:

These self righteous frumps seem to be multiplying exponentially here in Indonesia. Maybe a burqa would be preferable in the barberess' s case.

It is unlawful for a woman to cut her hair to disfigure herself, though if done for thesake of beauty it is permissible.

So Siead O’Connor is ok, but one would think have disfigurement imposed would not be, but the policewomen with the clippers no doubt would take the legalistic view: the ruling says “disfigure herself” and they did it for these wayward girls.

The Aceh punk roundup story has legs that are still running strong. “AnarchoPunks n Moscow have grafittied the Indonesian Embassy in Moscow with slogans such as:

“Religion=Fascism.” and “Punk is not a crime.”

Buy those lads some vodka!

Sinéad is shariah compliant, as long as she didn't intend to "disfigure herself." Who knows?

As of yesterday, December 20, the punks were holding up well.. This WP/AP story details their defiance.

At the same time, Secretary Clinton has been holding a conference( closed proceedings ) with the OIC in

Fully compliant

Washington so as to work on eliminating defamation of religion and religious prejudice. No doubt a press release announcing a multifaith center with a church and a synagogue in Mecca is forthcoming.

What's the big deal? It's just a haircut! No disrepect to Holocaust victims meant. Islam, like Nazism is a supremacist, totalitarian ideology. Totalitarianism starts incrementally.

Listen to the punks: they know the truth.

*( From: “Reliance of The traveler, a Manual of Islamic Sacred Law” A compendium of scholarship of the Shafi school. Published in English and Arabic by Amana Publications, Maryland USA. 2008 edition. Certified for accuracy of translation and scholarship by Al Azhar University Cairo and the International Institute for Islamic thought, Herndon, Virgina, USA, among others. All other comments on Islamic law and religious practice in this piece are from the same source.”

I spent 25 bucks on Amazon for a copy of “Reliance of the Traveller.” It is not a travel guide, but a manual of Islamic sacred law( fiqh), which encompasses, and expands on, the the shariah of the Koran, according to the Shafi’i school of jurisprudence. The “traveler” is the Muslim living his life from birth to death, and the book provides religious guidance and rulings for aspects of life on which he may rely.

It sat on my bookshelf for months, a weighty read not happily anticipated, but when I finally opened he wrapping , the book surprised me with its readability, and so far has confirmed my forebodings as to Islam. In fact, things are worse than I thought,

One learns that there are more than one school of Islamic jurisprudence, of whichi the Hanafi is one, but that they are largely in agreement on matters of faith and morals, That which has been agreed on by a consensus of scholars is obligatory; that which is not ,is decided by the ummah, the muslims as a community, That which has been decided by the ummah in the past is in effect and not to be questioned, An ordinary Muslim is not to question a scholar in command of sacred noweldge,

And the purpose of sacred knowledge, that is theology and in Islam, law as well, without distinction, in obligation is to enable Muslims to follow the example of their messenger, Using the techniques of scholarship for any other purpose is forbidden:

Anyone who seeks Sacred Knowledge to argue with fools, vie with scholars,or draw people’s attention to himself, will take a place in Hell.

Thus there can be no scholasticism, as in Europe where reason was used in an attempt to justify faith, but in the end overturned its unchallenged authority over human life. Instead, in Islam a dense legalism nibbles at the edges of the religious corpus, as so much has been decided that scholars are left to debate minutiae or shoehorn unexpected situations into agreement with the precedents of a millennium or more ago,

Reading this book is instantly enlightening. That precedent cannot be overturned and that ancient consensus must hold forever the reader thinks, must be related to the stasis, and backwardness of Islamic societies.

Knowledge other than sacred knowledge or learning that may be used to advance sacred knowledge is unlawful.a

These are are areas of unlawful knowledge in Islam:(page 14, section a7.2)

sorcery

Philopsohy

magic

astrology

the scence of the materiaists

and anything that is a means to create doubts(in eternal truths)

That philosophy and science based on material observation are proscribed likely has much to do with countries like Saudi Arabia still finding sorcery and magic to prosecute.

There is much more to read and reflect on, a task of some months, but I have seen enough to know that Islam constrains itself with iron limits on the spirit and intellect that have kept it in the state of underdevelopment that it so resents, and that may in the end be its utter undoing.

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